The Journey

In 1848 Edward Lear, writer and illustrator of nonsense verse, set out on an epic journey through Greece and Albania. But Lear was more than just a humourist, he was an excellent landscape artist, traveller and writer of travel books.

With Lear’s writings and drawings as a guide Robert Horne has followed Lear’s journey through the awe-inspiring scenery of the southern Balkans, where he has encountered fascinating reminders of a turbulent past and the warmth of the modern inhabitants: the inspiration for all travellers.

Who was Edward Lear? Many of us have enjoyed the popular nonsense verse The Owl and the Pussycat and it is for comic rhymes that Edward Lear became famous. But it is his life as a serious landscape painter and great Victorian traveller, that is the inspiration behind this documentary. He was one of the first Westerners to explore and illustrate some of the remote Balkan mountain regions of the Ottoman Empire. Lear’s original intention when he set out on a journey to the ‘East’ was to visit the famous monasteries of Mt. Athos. An outbreak of the plague in Thessalonika altered his plans. In typical intrepid fashion he continued on a meandering epic adventure that took him across the Balkan mountains from coast to coast, drawing and writing his journal on the way.

Lear was an attractive and convivial companion and had many friends, but his humourous exterior hid a lonely and troubled character wracked with doubts and troubled by short sight, epilepsy and asthma. This three-part documentary explores Lear’s character through his arduous and dangerous exploits in a still little known pocket of Europe - through northern Greece, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Albania. It is a region often as little understood today as it was then, whose wild and spectacular landscapes are some of the most magnificent, unspoiled and still barely visited in Europe. How the modern inhabitants of the region have come to terms with their often troubled history is one of the themes that evolves on the journey.

The Drawings
Lear left an intriguing legacy of unparalleled drawings and paintings that illustrate his epic journey. The making of the series is indebted to the availability of these through the generosity and help of the Gennadius Library and its Director Maria Georgopoulou, the department of Paintings, Prints, and Drawings, the Benaki Museum, and its Curator Fani-Maria Tsigakou, both in Athens, and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, that holds the largest collection of Lear’s works.

© LEAR PRODUCTIONS 2009